February Sucked, and other whinings

Hi, can I complain for a second?

I try to only complain once every few months or so except in my humor columns, where my misfortunes are supposed to be humorous. Nobody likes a complainer. In fact, don't read this. Just stop right there and head on over to some video of cute horses toying with much smaller humans.

"You think you're gonna ride me? I'll mess you the heck up."

Good, now I can write this just for me, which takes a lot of the pressure off. It's a private diary entry that happens to be available to billions of people. Anyway, basically I'm just here because February sucked.

Some people don't like the word "sucked" in this context, seeing it as a naughty word of sorts. I get that; I'm not really a fan of bad language. But in this case I feel I'm justified, because February did suck, and the only other words that might describe it are way worse.

I was sick for all of February, first with a cold and then my annual sinus infection; my wife was sick for only half that time, although with the same thing. (Which, yes, means it was my fault.) In this we were in good company: 90% of all the people in Indiana, and 75% of all the people in the world, also got sick in February. What else is there to do? It's February.

Of course, February sucks every year. It's maybe a little better than January but worse than December, and way worse than March--although March has its moments. I understand these are actually good months if you live in Key West, South Africa, or New Zealand. But New Zealand keeps getting overrun by Hobbits, so there's that.

"This sucks."

I think maybe what triggered this is a combination of Seasonal Affected Disorder and Facebook. SAD is only depressing during winter, and is a condition in which sane people feel bad because they recognize how much winter sucks. Facebook is depressing all year round. But this particular February, it seemed like every time I looked at Facebook someone had died, either locally or celebrity-wise.

The celebrity part isn't important, and functions mostly to remind me I'm getting older. But locally, the population of my home town dropped 10% this February.

And then, on the last day of the month, my father's sister and my mother's brother both passed away. It happened in different states, and was completely coincidental. And yet, I couldn't help thinking that it was February's last, parting middle finger of suckiness.

I wanted to touch on that, so I could end on a less negative note. Almost anything is less negative than that.

There were other, little things, too. I tried my best to shatter my foot (yes, I wrote a blog about it--be patient); our book sales, like February, sucked, but from what I've heard the same thing happened to all my writer friends. (I assume book sales would have been bad for non-writers, if they'd had any.) Then there was the weather, which was very February-like.

"I would just like to point out that this is NOT dandruff."

But now it's March. Meteorological spring, a time of longer days and, hopefully, the first green shoots of a new season. Time to pull ourselves up by our boot straps, which as a firefighter I've literally done, and accentuate the positive.

The positive being that it's not February. Which sucked.